Hack 2005

Hack, Daniel. The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Print.

• come back to Deronda chapter

Intro

• useful as a sane definition of materiality and the problems with the term
• 1 [the problem with materiality] ...the currency of materiality-talk in literary and cultural studies today reflects less a shared understanding or object of interest than a widespread contest for ownership of this terminology; we are all "materialists" now.
• ...this study seeks to keep distinct the four primary, contemporary referents of materiality— economic, physical, linguistic, and corporeal— while at the same time keeping them all in play, precisely in order to keep [2] open the question of their relationships to one another. My approach is historical and critical rather than theoretical: instead of attempting to decide what should count as "material,” I examine how the conditions, components, and consequences of writing now conjured by that term were put into discourse in the mid-C19.
• 2 The investigation and mobilization of writing’s putative materialities proves central to efforts to establish the boundaries and relations between textual and extratextual phenomena— the word and the world— and to determine in turn the ethical purchase of the novel as a genre and the literary and cultural authority of its producers.
  • Elizabeth Barrett Browning#Aurora Leigh "the world of books is still the world"
• Shakespeare’s sonnet 111 about "difficulties of abstracting oneself from some material realm"
  • I’m unclear again: "linguistic materiality" as the poem’s formality? A little more clear in the quote on 4: "language ‘prevents individual humans from being able to present their thoughts as the inner content of their bodies to others in apprehensible form...because it has a body of its own. If it didn’t have a body...it wouldn’t be perceptible or legible at all. Having a body, it, like material objects, has a perceptively and opacity of its own that continually exceeds its representative function."
    • from Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime
• 5 citing Thomas Carlyle talking about the constraints of Shakespeare having to work for the Globe ("no man works save under conditions"): "Yet where Shakespeare emphasizes the economically driven institutional nature of the constraints under which he operates, Carlyle identifies these constraints as more broadly social, or even ontological."
• 6 C19 writers are interested...in exploring the relations among what Carlyle himself might agree to call writing’s multiple material conditions [economic, physical, and linguistic]
• 7 method: I explore this project by reading the Victorian discourse on authorship and a series of novels...as sustained, reflexive investigations into the meaning and multiple relevance of the physicality of the written or printed word, the exchange of texts for money, the workings and slippages of signification, and the corporealities of character, writer, and reader.
• l/u Bodenheimer, "Knowing and Telling in Dickens’s Retrospects"
• 9 We shall see that although authors and texts "suggest" in myriad ways their constitutive and contingent materiality, such suggestions are themselves loaded, even functioning at times as covert claims for the very detachment they seem to abjure.